10 Killer Tips For Designing Highly Effective Website

The performance metrics of the website is defined in terms of its usability and utility. The more value your website offers to the visitors, the more effective it is considered. So, how about making your website successful? Here are 10 surefire tips which will help you in designing the website which becomes your visitors “word of the mouth” and ultimately boost your site-traffic.

Knowing Your Customers

The most important thing that matters in making your website effective is the customers. Knowing the attitude and behavior of the target audience thus plays a crucial role in delivering value to your customers. A website is analogous to a store where the success of the store entirely depends on the loyalty of the customer. Knowing the customers and offering valuable deals enable them to compete with other brands. Thus understanding your visitors, their needs and instincts help you in achieving highly realizable design.

Shape The Personality Of Your Website

Website acts as the medium of interaction with online clients, visitors and customers. Providing valuable content, quality service / products and visual communication helps in strengthening the relationship with your customers. Just like your qualities, traits and habits speak volumes about you, having an optimal design (in terms of organized layout, attractive color scheme, appropriate typography and visual appeal) along with the usability aspect (like type of products/ service you offer, tone of the copy and the support you extend to your users) render identity to your website.

Organized Layout

Organized and intuitive layout helps you in making your visitors feel at home — comfortable and relaxed. Clearly laid out navigation panel, properly arranged sidebars, informative footers, appropriate template (relevant to website’s purpose) and highly optimized focus point (content in case of a weblog and marketing pitch for product and services otherwise) contributes in making highly realizable interface which is simple and easy for visitors to accept and sift through.

The Right Color Scheme

Colors hold psychological, cultural and behavioral values and depending on your niche choosing the right color scheme triggers the user interaction. Choosing the minimal color scheme (set of 2 or 3 colors) works fine most of the times but if you have some special requirements like designing the mysterious website (about paranormal sciences) or a rock-band website having a dark color scheme is justified.

Dark Color Scheme

Enhanced Readability

Readability affects the favorability of your website. Simply because reading on the screen causes eye-strain especially when trying to read the small fonts. It is thus preferable to use 12px as the minimum font size when designing for web. While most of the common fonts are designed for good readability, take care of the vertical spacing of the lines of the text as well.

Scan-able Web Pages

The online users don’t read the content, they scan the content. The same principle follows when they visit a website. They do not stay back to examine the website, they just scan through the webpages to find what is required. Thus providing proper navigation, breadcrumbs support, organized content and clearly laid out subscription option help you in highlighting what your visitors want.

Simplify Things

Popularly known as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is the mantra of being successful over internet. Accordingly simplifying the interaction with your website helps you in building a usable website. If you are offering the products for sale or provide services upon registration make sure that the process is simple and easy to follow. Lengthy follow-ups discourage the users in filling the forms.

Simplified Form Filling

Strike Balance Between Usability And Visual Appeal

Effectiveness is directly related to the value a product yield to its customer. Similar is the case with a website. Offering valuable information / product / service should be the primary goal of the website. This accounts for the face value of the website whilst the visual appeal which bounds the visitors to its aesthetics. So whatever the primary goal of the website be, it is important that you maintain a balance between the two. As such an article supported by illustrations and graphics is far more attractive (and easy to understand) as compared to the page with blobs of text.

Address Your User’s Needs

The essence of an effective website lies in the usability and utility of the website. If the website is not rendering any value to the customer, he might well not re-visit the website. Providing valuable products, services, information, resources, etc on the regular basis helps you winning the customers.

Optimize Your Loading Time

The crowd of online visitors is impatient. They don’t like to wait. If your website doesn’t load instantly, your chances of loosing the customers is very high. Do away with it the first time you realize that your website takes more than 1-2 seconds to load.